No murder before chapter five

Note: this was originally published in Weighted Tangents, my Substack newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

“I am apt to find, in the laundry list, a scribble reading, ‘Shirley, don’t forget—no murder before chapter five.’” —Shirley Jackson

Every summer Saturday we’d tumble into the red velvet-upholstered Crown Victoria, laden down with coolers of food and an overindulgence of clothing, to spend the weekend at the cottage. Perched atop a concrete breakwall pebbled with bits of stone and shell and overlooking Lake Erie, the cottage was little more than four walls and a roof built in the decades before I was born. I’m not sure we were ever deterred by the weather, as a rainy day at the beach always beat out a rainy day at home, the change of venue enough of a balm to keep cooped-up tempers from flaring.

On rainy days—and in those interminable stretches of summer boredom that cropped up once we had exhausted ourselves of swimming, rock-collecting, and relentlessly teasing one another—we had two options for entertainment: cards or puzzles. Since our card game repertoire consisted of Solitaire and Go-Fish, puzzles often won out.

I loved running my hand through the box of pieces, my fingers brushing over cardboard backings and the sticky gloss of a disembodied image as I scrambled the pieces with the practiced carelessness of adolescence, daring my parents to look up from their reading to scold me. I’d pluck a piece out at random and revel in guessing where it belonged, searching for the slightest gradation in color or snip of a pattern and then throwing it down in what I believed to be its final coordinates in the finished puzzle, staking out unclaimed territories across the kitchen tablecloth.

Writing has started to feel not unlike putting together a puzzle. I have the final image in my mind, and now it’s a matter of sorting through all the pieces and finding the ones that click together. But with writing I also have the ability to shape each individual piece, clipping its edges or touching up the image to better mold it to my vision.

In the puzzle that is developing the story of Æthelflæd, I’ve found a missing piece tucked away in Douglas Glover’s essays in Attack of the Copula Spiders, namely in the idea of a boss image—"…a species or subset of repeating images in which a single overarching image controls the meaning of the story." The idea of King Alfred hiding in the Somerset marshes with his family¹, protected from the Danes by thick blankets of fog, conjures up a wild word web of associated terms and phrases stemming from fog—fog of war, occlusion, dream state, burned away, brain fog, shroud, ethereal, mist and mystical—and suddenly Æthelflæd’s story starts to take shape for me.

With a root image sorted, I’ve reached into the box of history, rummaging my hand around and enjoying the clacking of pieces. The trick now is to find the ones that click together and begin assembling the story.

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up your pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing. —Shirley Jackson

Until next week!

xo